Free Flight: Duration
TRANQUILIZER for up-tight coverings. Paul McIlrath presents this tip: Lightweight wing and tail frames covered with undoped tissue or condenser paper often start to warp uncontrollably weeks or months after they are built. The warps are caused by the gradual shrinkage of the paper, which seems to go on forever. The next time that your usual straightening methods don't work, and you're faced with a tedious recovering job, try this trick first. Mix one part glycerine with about eight or 10 parts of water. Spray the tight tissue lightly with the mixture and allow to dry. As the water evaporates, the small amount of glycerine will remain in the tissue and relax it a little. If the covering is still too tight, spray it again. You may have to do it several times. Eventually the paper will slacken, and the frame will go back to its natural shape.
Free Flight: Duration
STRONGER gas-model fuselages: for the past quarter-century, almost all gas-power models have used what amounts to a box made of balsa sheet for the fuselage. The sides are 1/16-in. (1/2-A) to 1/8-in (Class D); the top and bottom might be sheet stock of the same thickness as the sides, or they might be twice the thickness of the sides. Formers, at appropriate intervals, such as two to four times the height of the fuselage, do several things: they keep everything nice and square during construction, and they keep the sides from splitting, which could lead to complete collapse of the fuselage in a mild crash. Any respectable FF Gas model must be able to survive a mild crash once in awhile. And so, for the fuselage sides to do the job they were destined for, they have to stay stuck to the formers.
Free Flight: Duration
THE SHADDO KNOWS: It is no great secret that most successful designs are the result of an evolutionary process, a continuing program of eliminating the weak aspects and refining further the desirable. John Sites of Rockville, MD has traveled this design-evolution road in developing his Hand-Launched Glider, Shaddo. Having built 35 to 40 of the buggers over a five-year development period, even Lamont Cranston would agree that John's Shaddo is now a fully developed competition glider. Shaddo's heritage harks back to Ron Wittman's Supersweep, itself a product of a lengthy evolution. John began by adapting the Indorr record-holding design to be suitable for outdoor work, flying both 22- and 24-in. wingspans. Several development problems were encountered early on, such as the inability to achieve a high altitude on launch.
Free Flight: Duration
GRASS ROOTS PR: All Free Flight flying sites are too small, in the sense that sooner or later a model is going to drift off and land in potentially hostile territory: a local farmer's wheat field; a local resident's patio, roof, or picture window. Tramping through a farmer's life and blood, or scrambling over backyard fences and rooftops at 7:30 a.m. of a Sunday morn is not likely to endear us with the natives, and might lead to loss of the privilege of flying in those all-too-dear and all-too-few sites. On the flip side, good relations with the natives might lead to the return of models that might otherwise be deliberately trashed or destroyed in an attempt to fly them (by the locals).
U.S. Free Flight Championships
NESTLED in the southernmost corner of California's San Joaquin Valley, where the Coast Ranges and the Sierra Nevada meet in the Tehachapi Mountains dividing California into its Southern and Northern parts, lies Taft, again the site of the annual U.S. Free Flight Championships. Held annually, over the three-day Memorial Day weekend, the Champs draws some 300 competitors, mostly from the western U.S., a few from the East and Midwest, Canada, and Mexico, an occasional one from New Zealand or Australia, and as is becoming a tradition, one from England: Paul Masterman, co-editor of Free Flight News. What can a writer say about an event which is bound to be a replay of what happened last year, and the year before, with the same old guys doing the same old things?
